public secrets

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Secret Canada is a freedom of information project from The Globe and Mail.
Information is the bedrock of democracy. Freedom of information laws give you the right to obtain records held by public institutions. This project helps you navigate Canada’s access system.”

Kids keep getting sicker as evidence for COVID immune damage builds

If we were to see immune damage manifesting at a population level, it would look like what we’re seeing today: big waves of common illnesses. Unusual spikes of uncommon illnesses. Course reversal for previously declining and eliminated illnesses. An unexplained, global wave of sickness.

“I spent 5+ years as a billionaire’s wordsmith, which meant knowing him intimately enough to write in his voice.

I think the thread running through most of them is not a belief in their own basic goodness but rather contempt for everyone else, including and especially their peers. Expressing that contempt with plausible deniability was part of my (usually) unspoken mandate.

Contempt and duper’s delight. Those were the last thrills once $$ reached a point of diminishing returns.” —@kims

The life of a bicyclist is worth $1150…. apparently.

“Christopher Shawn Basque of Chilliwack, B.C., pleaded guilty in North Vancouver Provincial Court to one count of driving without due care and attention on Friday. The court ordered him to pay a $1,000 fine and a $150 victim surcharge.”
RIP to this poor woman who was just riding a bike.”

Dump truck driver pleads guilty in fatal cyclist collision in North Vancouver

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a new understanding of my confusion

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In my last post on adapting to chaos I asked — what changes in our sensemaking practices should we incorporate to adapt to a world that is often more chaotic than complex? I received 12 comments here and another ten comments on LinkedIn. Confusion was one theme commented upon and Chris Corrigan referenced an excellent post on that topic — escaping confusion.

In the domain of Confusion the first and most important action, I believe, is an awareness that you are there. Without awareness you are lost. Any action that you undertake from that place is likely to be based on conditioning without any sensitivity to your context and that can be incredibly dangerous. In fact if you look at Dave’s central domain map you will see that Confusion is adjacent to the Clear, Complicated, and Chaotic domains. The division of the central domain into Confusion and Aporia implies that you cannot get to Complex from Confusion without taking what Dave [Snowden] calls the Aporetic Turn.

Nollind Wachell, with whom I had many discussion on Google+ several years ago, commented that,  “In effect, often true growth and development doesn’t occur without some form of pain and suffering because it’s needed to wake a person up, slow them down, and help them perceive and see things that they were blind to before. Something that I think needs to happen (ie an awakening) in not just America but in many places around the world, Canada included.” Perhaps we need the shock of confusion in order to move toward Aporia and then wake up. Nollind also suggested a 2007 MPRA paper, Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation for Profound Change, Individual Cultivation, and Radical Innovation.

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adapting to chaos

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I’m finding it difficult to write here these days. And I have written a fair bit as this is post #3,685. Given the turmoil with our American neighbours it’s hard to focus on much else. Just in my professional networks on both sides of the border I personally know people who have lost their jobs, their clients, and any ability to plan for the near future — all in the past month.

I should be writing a book. I even have a publisher. But I won’t. At least not at this time. Most of my thinking time is focused on the aggressive behaviour of our once-ally, the United States, and the continuous threats to our sovereignty. The fact that Trump was re-elected still shocks me. It shows how flawed the US electoral system is, and I know that we have enough of our own flaws here in Canada. I spent most of my initial career as an Infantry officer, training to fight the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. It seems that my later years in life may be fighting, at least economically, the Russian regime and the American administration that supports it.

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embrace the fediverse

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“If you are staying on a corporate social media platform because the people you follow are still there, consider others are also staying there because you are still there. Someone needs to start the move. Be that person.
Leave X for good.
Leave Facebook forever.
Remember blue skies eventually turn grey.
Embrace the social media that cannot get sold to a billionaire. Embrace the Fediverse“
—@Em

“Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” —Tommy Douglas

“Remember when you were a kid and adults used to ask you what you would do if everyone else you knew was jumping off a cliff? Would you jump too? Now you know.” —@JeremyMallin

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making time

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In the past year many workers in the tech sector have lost their jobs, often replaced by the vision of what generative AI can do instead. I know of lay-offs in bio-tech as well and now we are seeing massive firings in the US civil service. One consequence of all of these job losses is that fewer people will have to do more work. My observations of medium to large organizations has been that most people are busy, most of the time. Back to back meetings are not uncommon as well as overflowing email in-boxes.

This is a challenge for performance improvement, learning, and knowledge management initiatives. Any new attempts to improve these will be seen as extra work on top of a demanding work load. While those of us in the field of organizational performance improvement know the long-term value of better knowledge sharing, collaboration, and cooperation, getting over the short-term pain can be insurmountable. I have learned that it’s important to first find and make more time and space for knowledge workers.

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learning is not something we got

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I came across an older blog post today that reminded me about the year 2001. That was when I left my university-based job at the Centre for Learning Technologies (which was closing) and joined a small local e-learning company that had developed a learning management system (LMS) where I was the head of professional services.

I joined in February of that year and we attended a major trade show, Online Learning 2001 in late September. This was only a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks. We flew through Newark airport and during our stopover had a clear view of the smoking Twin Towers. It was eerie and quiet as few people were traveling at this time. Many other local learning companies traveled to this event as our pavilion was hosted by the New Brunswick government. On arrival we attended a reception hosted by the Canadian consulate and each person was given a lapel pin with crossed US and Canadian flags which we all gladly wore in solidarity with our American neighbours.

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be the revolution

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, via @Susan Kaye Quinn

“To those who can hear me, I say do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” —Charlie Chaplin The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, 1940

George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics.

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every medium reverses its properties when pushed to its limits

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In 2018  — seeing the figure through the ground — I used the Laws of Media developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan to examine the impact of social media. McLuhan’s Laws state that every medium (technology) used by people has four effects. Every medium extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good), retrieves a much older medium, and reverses its properties when pushed to its limits. These four aspects are known as the media tetrad.

This image was the resulting tetrad.

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rebuilding trust one catalyst at a time

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I have worked in the fields of human performance improvement, social learning, collaboration, and sensemaking for several decades. Currently in all of these fields the dominant discussion is about using and integrating generative artificial intelligence [AKA machine learning] using large language models. I am not seeing many discussions about improving individual human intelligence or our collective intelligence. My personal knowledge mastery workshops focus on these and leave AI as a side issue when we discuss tools near the end of each workshop. There is enough to deal with in improving how we seek, make sense of, and share our knowledge.

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let’s go on to organize

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Ten years ago I wrote a series of posts for Cisco on the topic of ‘The Internet of Everything’ (IoE), which was a variation on the Internet of Things, or the idea that all objects, such as light-bulbs and refrigerators, would be connected to the internet. With AI in everything now, I guess we are at that stage of technology intrusion, or rather techno-monopolist intrusion.

I would like to review some of the highlights from a decade ago.

tl;dr — little has changed

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